


Emotional and Literal Squalor

by raspberryseedz



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: During Canon, Gen, Missing Scene, Nick thinks too much, Sulking, after the press conference, mild swearing, out of context movie quotes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 11:17:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6751804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryseedz/pseuds/raspberryseedz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Nick Wilde was up to between the press conference and being found under a bridge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emotional and Literal Squalor

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a solitary drabble for my little drabble collection and 6,000 words later I decided it could use it's own post. I'm probably the billionth person to write something like this but, ehh?

With nothing left to do, he trudged back to his apartment.

His anger, the visceral part of it, simmered off and evaporated relatively quickly.  What it left behind was an empty, numb, morose feeling like someone dug out his insides and replaced them with fog.

He was acutely aware of how quiet his apartment was.  Dismally quiet.  After the lights flickered on he dug the remote for the television out from under a pile of his laundry and activated the thing. 

“What’s up doc?” Said the lady on the screen, munching on a carrot stick.

“I beg your pardon,” said her co-star, whoever he was.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

It was the first thing that came on.  Some thirty-year-old-ish screwball comedy with Barbra Streisand talking very fast.  He didn’t really care at all what was on so long as he had some white noise in the background so he went into the fridge looking for leftovers and let it play.

“Was it something I said?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Listen, what do you think I am, a piece of ripe fruit to squeeze the juice out of and toss aside?” She said, rapid fire.  Nick uncovered a two week old bag of Panda takeout and promptly threw it into the garbage.

“You’re making a mistake.”

“That’s all I am to you.  A mistake. A clerical error. Erase me.  Forget you even know my name.”

“I don’t know your name.”

“Judy Maxwell.”

He scrambled for the remote and his thumb jammed the button to advance the channel.  Over fifty channels and he had to hit the one with the ironic dialogue.

Click.

“Anybody ever make a sucker out of you?  This is a matter of principle.  Something you probably wouldn’t understand, but when anyone takes me for a buggy ride I don’t like the idea of having to pay for the privilege.”

Click.

“He’s a loose cannon cop who doesn’t play by the rules.”

Click.

“Here I go again on my own--”

Click.

“You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an ass-”

Click.

“You’ve got a friend in-”

He shut the dumb thing down and chucked the remote across the room.  The little device hit the wall with a dry thud, batteries knocked out on impact.  He let it lie there broken.  Vanquished, really.  With the apartment plunged back into silence once again he turned back to the fridge in search of dinner.

Maybe it was something about the florescent light or the lingering smell of outdated chow mien, but a minute later he realized he wasn’t even hungry.

* * *

 

He tried working the next day, but his heart wasn't really in it.  Cons relied on an ample supply of self confidence and it was difficult to manage when he felt like such a putz himself. He kept feeling pulled back.  Like something large and heavy and probably lead-based were tied around his ankles and he had to drag them along with each step.  

They somehow got an elderly hippo woman in line at the Rawrcade to cover their purchase of a pack of jawbreakers and spent the better part of the day smashing them down into rock candy.  He jammed his thumb accidentally and Finnick snatched the hammer back.  

“What is with you?” He practically barked.  “Someone shove mashed potatoes in between your ears?”

“I’m fine.”

“Fuzz must’ve messed you up-”

“ _ I’m fine! _ ”  He snatched a handkerchief-ful of ice from the cooler for his paw and climbed to the front of the van to sulk in the passenger seat.  Finnick grumbled something that had “red” and “damned” and “diaper” phrased in it and sledgehammered another giant jaw breaker with a pick.

And it wasn't even as if she’d lied or anything either, that he could at least understand.  He'd been tricking people professionally since the mid-90s, he could respect a good con at his expense when there was something to be gained.  He didn’t like it, but he could respect it.  Her literally dangling the carrot of freedom to trap him into helping her out, kinda weird, but it was still an exchange that made some logical sense.  It wasn’t personal. In between the running and the terror for his life, it was even kind of fun for a minute there.  Who could’ve guessed cute, little, morally righteous bunny officer was actually a bit of a smart-aleck. She even bent the system a little.  And enjoyed it. Interesting.

She didn’t lie, though, she had meant it. Everything at that press conference was her, completely sincere.  She was afraid of him.  Maybe she had been trying to trick herself into thinking she wasn’t and somehow got him to buy into it as well.  He should’ve known better.

She was just like everybody else.  

“You could at least make yourself useful and pick up the pieces,” Finnick grumbled, low and dangerous. He tucked into destroying the large candy with a rage twice his size.  Nick let his forehead fall on the dashboard.

* * *

 

For three days, in the back of his mind, he was worried she would show up on any given street corner and hound him again.  She’d managed to find him once out of nowhere, he had no doubt in his mind she could do it again.

He’d always had his eyes peeled for black and white squad cars, an occupational habit.   But lately anything, even a passing zebra, made him jumpy.  He just about lost his heart through his through his throat when a whining siren sprung to life behind them as they were passing an intersection.  Their van pulled over to the side of a curb between a gas station and a rundown second-hand bookstore.  Finnick was driving, still in costume, a set of plush rhino pajamas, rattle sewn into the horn that made noise whenever he turned.  Coincidentally, it was a rhino officer who knelt down and tapped on their window after the van pulled over. Finnick cranked the little handle on the inside of his door to lower the window.

The officer ducked down, glancing suspiciously between the two foxes, finally settling on the fennec dressed like a toddler.  “This better not be what it looks like,” he said.

“Care to explain what it looks like?” Finnick asked in a hoarse voice.

The rhino waited a beat, then said, “License and registration.”

Finnick leaned out of the car window, shoving his nose into the air in a vain attempt to appear taller.  “What seems to be the problem officer?”

“License and registration, fox,” he repeated.

Finnick narrowed his large eyes.  “You ain’t gonna tell me what I’m being pulled over for?” His pace increased, anger growing, “Do you have a reason or are you cops really that bored? You can just-”

“For the love of heaven, Finnick, just give him your license,” Nick ground the heel of his paw into his forehead.  He was pretty sure he was developing a migraine.

“Don’t get you tail in a twist!” Finnick snapped.  “This isn’t about you.” After patting down his pockets and coming up with nothing he smacked Nick’s arm, wordlessly gesturing to help him look in the van’s glove compartment.

Nick bit down on a retort and threw the compartment door open over his knees.  The van was originally outfitted for a slightly larger mammal and the compartment door was almost big enough to fit his whole head if it weren’t so cluttered.  The thing hadn’t been cleaned out in years, probably.  Amidst all the old receipts and gum wrappers and the odd canister of spray paint was a rolled up poster of the bleach mohawk-ed white seal himself, Vanilla Ice, which Nick would have to find a way to bring up later in a less volatile situation.  His fingers finally landed on a card appropriately licensed sized and he recovered it from the mess.  It was a driver’s license, alright.  For a Fred Foxx that bore a photo with a striking resemblance to Finnick, albeit a little younger, eyes even bigger if that was at all possible, fur slicked back into place and the collar of a blue polo shirt just barely visible. Red letters at the bottom indicated he hit legal drinking age in 2002.

“Not that one,” Finnick muttered out the side of his snout.  The officer began leaning in, shadow bearing down on the van window, clearly growing impatient.  Finnick turned on him.  “What? You got no concept of personal space, gigantor?”

“Sir, you keep that up I’ll have to take you downtown for contempt,” the rhino crossed his great arms.

“I ain’t contempt-ing nothin’!” Finnick barked back.

Just when he began to fear the worst, Nick at long last uncovered a license with the correct name and pushed the Finnick back into his seat with one paw. This accomplished, one, shutting the fox up before he caused a greater incident, and two, enabling his stretch across the van’s front seat to hand the card off to the mammal in blue.  “There you are officer,” he said as calm and collected as possible.  “Don’t mind this guy.  He suffers from acute vacillating hyper-coprolalia disorder.  He says things sometimes,” he put a placating paw on Finnick’s head and flashed his best _ ‘tragic, ain’t it’  _ face.  “Doctors can only do so much.”

Finnick growled, low and nasty, and Nick clamped his paw over the smaller fox’s muzzle.

“He suffers from what?” The rhino looked up from studying Finnick’s license, pinched between his hooves like the strip off a fortune cookie, to squint in confusion at Nick.

“You know, AVHCD,” Nick said without missing a beat.

“Uh huh,” the officer’s eyes narrowed, the great horn bobbed towards the van as he nodded.

“Incidentally, I think we both know contempt of cop isn’t an _ actual _ punishable offense,” Nick continued cooly.

“Disorderly conduct is,” the rhino said simply.  He tore off a sheet of paper and took a knee, hovering with his beady rhino eyes and horn that could probably overturn their vehicle if he rammed it hard enough.  He handed the ticket and the license back at Finnick.  “You’ve got two brake lights out.  Rear left and center.  I’m issuing you a warning.  I’d get them replaced to avoid escalating any further citations.”  Finnick snatched the ticket from him lightning fast, like a cobra strike.  “And I would keep that AV-whatever in check if you’d like to stay out of trouble.”  

“You’re a peach, officer.  Isn’t he just a peach, Finn?” Nick transitioned from holding Finnick by the muzzle to wrapping his arm around the smaller fox’s shoulders in a near headlock.

“Don’t patronize me, jerk!” He snapped.

“Oh, you lovable scamp,” Nick tousled the area between his oversized ears. His string of curses were somewhat muffled under Nick's arms.

Officer Horne left them, shaking his head. Nick didn't know if the rhino actually believed them or just didn't want to bother with the paperwork involved in taking them in. At least he didn’t try to search the van.  He returned to his squad car, which dwarfed their van about three times over, and left ahead of them.

Finnick took a swipe at Nick, hopefully missing on purpose, and the larger fox let him go.

“The hell was that?” Finnick demanded.

“You need to dial back that rage meter, man.”

“You need to stop making up fake ass disorders.”

“Hey, hey, we almost got five grand that time you had Minute Crantitus Syndrome.”

“And I still get phone calls from that lady in Old Den.” Finnick shuddered. He twisted the key in the ignition and the van rumbled to life. “Haven't you learned  _ anything _ about hustling the fuzz?”

Nick's expression soured. “That wasn’t a hustle.  It was an evasive tactic. That I wouldn’t have to use if you possessed the teeniest bit of tact.”

“I can’t help what grinds my gears. Fat ass prey think they can boss everybody around cause the ground rumbles whenever they walk,” Finnick hit the accelerator and the van swerved back into the lane. Something in the back fell over and crashed but neither fox reacted.  Nick was too used to how Finnick drove.

“Not the time for the size complex, big guy.  And I’d watch those turns if you don’t want to get pulled over twice in a row.”

“I still want to chew that horn off.”

“And comments like that aren’t helping.”

“Helping what?” Finnick demanded.  “He can’t hear me.”

“I’m just saying it doesn’t help in general, you know…society and everything. Coexisting.”

Finnick threw his head back in a loud, barking, condescending laugh.  “That’s the most pretentious goddamn thing you’ve ever said.”

“ _ That’s  _ the most pretentious thing I’ve said?”

“Coexisting,  _ please _ .  As if anybody really cares.”

Nick slouched further in his seat.  He was probably right.  Every mammal for himself, and all that. 

“By the way, who’s Fred?” Nick turned to Finnick with a little smirk.

He acknowledged the sudden change of subject with, “I don’t have to tell you shit.”

After that day he realized Judy probably wasn’t looking for him.  In fact, it was foolish to even assume that she would.  She didn’t need him for anything.  And he didn’t need her. And it was a big city, some four million mammals. It would stand to reason they wouldn't run into each other anyway.  He’ll never see her again.

* * *

 

He stopped watching the news after the protests started. Generally avoided that particular area downtown as well.  Main street, City Hall, the ZPD, places to steer clear of even on a good day.

A small fight broke out one night on Reitherman Ave while he was walking home.  He didn’t see how it started nor he did he stick around to see how it ended.  But he was there just long enough to see a cheetah take an open, gleaming swipe at someone before being rammed by a pair of horns across his middle and land against the front door of a nearby convenience store.  Alarms started blaring, mammals took to running.  The shopkeeper stuck his head out the window and threatened to call the cops.  The cheetah ambled to his feet. Nick crossed the street and fled before it got any uglier.  Oddly, instead of being grateful he hadn’t crossed the street earlier and possibly getting caught in the fight, he felt a little like a coward for avoiding it. Not that he was dumb enough to jump in and throw punches at strangers twice his size, but the store owner was probably left alone to deal with that mess.  Then again, he’d probably think Nick was using the distraction to shoplift or something.

He probably shouldn't have lunged at her like that. Of course she'd go for her spray. Anybody would. Just cause he would never literally attack her didn’t mean she’d override her own reflexes. It was unreasonable to expect her to.

She was so collected on that investigation, though.  So clear-headed in the face of danger.  He was the one panicking.  How was it she could keep her head while dodging an actual feral jaguar miles off the ground and yet get spooked when he just flashed claws.  He thought she’d know him better.  Maybe that wasn’t entirely fair.  It was a crazy two days, but it was still only two days.  How well did he know her really?

* * *

 

Maybe he shouldn’t have been such a jackass to her from the start. It might not have ended any differently, but maybe he wouldn’t feel guilty about it.

* * *

 

It wasn’t the worst day of his life, but it certainly was a contender.  He woke up to find something had busted in the apartment upstairs,  _ again _ , and his entire apartment was flooded.  Most of the morning was spent wading through knee-deep cold water, hauling clothes and books and whatever else he could salvage away from the water line. Oddly, the driest place that could hold most of it turned out to be the kitchen sink. 

He dug out his largest cooking pot, a deep, stainless steel thing his mother used to cook pasta in, and appropriated it to bail water out through the window.  The elderly badger lady that lived in the flat below him thought they were having a thunderstorm of nigh Biblical proportions and holed herself up in her bathroom until water started leaking from her ceiling.  She fled to the parking lot only to discover there was no thunderstorm after all, only her upstairs neighbor dumping buckets out his window, and the two of them got into a shouting match that woke up half the apartment complex.  Eventually she left, presumably for drier pastures.

Nick eventually gave up clearing out his place after tripping over one of the many protruding pipes that plagued the walls of his cruel joke of an apartment and ended up with a painful bump on his shin the size of an egg.

He found a paper copy of his lease, or at least he assumed, it was so water-logged it was honestly hard to tell, and shot it in pieces out of a straw at the landlord’s window.  It was childish and impotent and it didn’t make him feel any better, but it killed some time while waiting around for the plumbers.

The apartment eventually got cleaned out.  He made a trip down to the dumpster to trash everything he couldn’t save. Luckily his phone made it out okay. The apartment got outfitted with three giant, roaring, electric fans, with the purpose of drying out the floors and walls.  He had to leave them on for two days.  Not only did they generate a lot of wind and noise, they made the tiny space heat up like a convection oven.  His room went from a cold, wet mess to a hot, dry one in the space of a few hours.  At the first opportunity he switched out of his damp clothes and bailed.

He was two blocks away from Finnick’s when he noticed the odd weight sitting in his pocket.  He pulled it out and stopped dead in his tracks, holding a carrot shaped pen.

He turned the thing over in his paw, just a little piece of orange and green plastic.  The pad of his thumb hit a button and he heard his own voice emerge from the speaker.

_ That’s three hundred and sixty-five days a year-- _

He hit it again, holding the button down.  The little pen made a whirring noise.

_ I make two hundred bucks a day, fluff-- _

Again.

_ Two hundred bucks a day _

Again.

_ Since I was twelve _

Again.

A blaring, impatient honk snapped him back to awareness.  The angry driver of a large, white catering truck was leaning halfway out of his vehicle, shaking a hoof in the air.  “Get outta the street, punk!”

“I’m walking, I’m walking,” Nick shouted back, throwing up his arms.

“So walk, jackass!”

He marched down the sidewalk with the pen clutched angrily in one paw.

Maybe he shouldn’t have stormed off like that.  It was like he was just waiting for the whole thing to go south at the first opportunity. 

Finnick was parked in his usual spot, napping in the driver’s seat.  Nick rapped on the window with his knuckle until he jolted awake and threw the door open.

“What?” His deep voice groaned.

“Finn, are we friends?” Nick asked.

The fennec fox answered him and his out of character candidness with a scathing, blank stare.  “You really are a moron,” he said.

* * *

 

He spent the night sleeping on Finnick’s couch.  Which was another way of saying ‘the folded down passenger seat in Finnick’s van’.  The tiny fox snored like a bear, which made sleeping tortuously difficult, but it was still less intrusive than the giant fans, so, preferable poison.

They drove around the next morning, stopping only once to pick up a pizza.

Nick was beginning to realize he really didn’t know much about his partner in crime at all.  Which he was always sort of aware of, they were both more private people than not. But it was starting to bother him.

“What did you want to do when you were a kit?” Nick asked, taking a seat, feet hanging over the end of the van.  They had the back open for the fresh air and the pizza box set up between them.

“The hell are you talking about now?”

“I dunno, I just thought, it’s probably not any young kit’s dream to grow up to be a petty crook in a diaper and pacifier.”

“I liked you better when your small talk was about other people’s misery,” Finnick glared.

“Alright, alright, if you don’t feel like telling me--” Nick waved him off, taking a drink from his large coke.

“I wanted to be a painter.”  Finnick said, point blank.  The slice of pizza he held looked huge in his paws, a hunk of melted cheese and crickets dangled off the end.

“Really?” Nick cocked his head, trying to imagine Finn in a glitzy museum surrounded by well-lit, sensitive Monet's.  For some reason the mental image came with a tiny champagne glass and beret hat, all the more ridiculous.  “A painter? Like, what kind?”

Finnick sighed, “It’s dumb.”

“No, it’s not dumb.  What kind?”

“You’ll just laugh.”

“I’ll laugh harder if you don’t tell me.”

“I wanted to be a muralist,”  Finnick said, gobbling up the pizza slice just as the sentence got out.

“I never would’ve pegged you as a proselytizer.”

“No, a  _ mural _ ist, idiot.”  Finnick said in between chewing. He balled up a paper napkin and chucked it at Nick’s head.  He batted it away, shrugging, a little sheepish.  Bad joke, point taken.

Finnick took his time finishing the pizza.  When he was done, bits of sauce still on his muzzle, he went on, “I used to hang around Griffin Park everyday after school. I wanted to paint a mural on the front wall, something cool that everybody would see walking around the streets before they went in.  Like the history of the city or a gargoyle fighting a dragon or something.”

“What?”

“I was eight.  Gargoyles fighting dragons were badass.”

“Can’t argue with that.  Be an improvement over all the tagging at least,” Nick said.

“Yeah, well this was before Griffin Park was ground zero for graffiti.”  Finnick tore a napkin down the center. “And I was just a kit.  I didn’t know better.”

Nick started to take a bite out of his slice and then put it down.  “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know… it takes clout to get your work up in a government space.  And money. Mammals that take you seriously.”  Finnick ripped at the napkin again, a pile of flimsy paper shreds accumulated in his lap.

“So what about the van? He-Fox and Lucy?”  He had nicknamed the characters decorating the side of Finnick’s old vehicle, an elaborately dressed Aztec fox fainting in the arms of a warrior, since the first time he saw it.

“They’re Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. I told you a thousand times--”

“You never told me you painted it,” Nick protested.  He would’ve remembered that.

“Yeah, well,” Finnick grabbed another napkin, in full on shred mode. He suddenly realized what he was doing and jumped up, violently clawing at the little paper explosion around him.  “You want me to drop you off or what?” He yelled.  “This ain’t a bed and breakfast, y’know.”

“Nah, I can’t turn off the fans for another twenty-four hours,” Nick leaned back, taking a casual bite out of his pizza slice, completely unphased by Finnick’s outburst.  He chose not to mention that if the front seat counted as a bed and the pizza counted as breakfast, technically all requirements for a bed and breakfast had been fulfilled.

“Bar rules apply, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!”  Finnick stomped through his van to get into the driver’s seat. Despite his size, the vehicle still noticeably rocked.  

Nick gave it about thirty seconds.  Then he got up, navigating around the pizza box and the old mason jars and the folded up pink stroller, and climbed into the passenger seat.  Finnick had his arms crossed tight over his chest and his feet propped up against the large steering wheel.  Nick didn’t want him to feel like he was staring, so he turned to look out the windshield, the view of the tight, brick wall that made up the alleyway they were parked in made the claustrophobic feeling all the more pronounced.

“For what it’s worth,” he started, “I bet at least half the city has seen this van at some point while walking around.  May not be a mural.  But that’s still kind of awesome.”

Finnick scoffed, but his ears folded back a little.  “Honestly, what pisses me off the most is how they let that whole area go to hell like that.  The park and everything.  That whole neighborhood.”

Nick nodded in understanding.  A dream was just a dream.  But it was a different kind of tragedy when something that did exist just disintegrated before your eyes for no reason.  

“Do you want to hit up an ice cream parlor or something?” Finnick asked, voice small.

“It’s too soon,” Nick said.  They had to keep a very careful schedule about what places to hit and how often.  If they conned or caused a scene in the same establishment on a regular basis mammals would catch wise.  He reached into his pocket to check his phone.  Instead his fingers closed around the pen, hitting the button just hard enough.

_ I make two hundred bucks a day, fluff _

“What was that?” Finnick snapped to attention.  The recording came out muffled through his pocket but was evidently just loud enough to make out.  Nick hit the button again to shut it off but he was apparently too late.  Finnick’s somber face had broken out into a large, wicked grin.  “Are you for real?” he asked, incredulous. “The fuzz pen?”

“It’s a carrot, for your information,” Nick took it out, pointing the green end of it in Finnick’s face as if he could turn the situation around that way.

“You’ve had it all this time and haven’t deleted it yet?”

“I forgot, okay!” Nick said.

“You forgot!?  She hustled you like a shmuck and you  _ forgot! _ ” Finnick burst out laughing.  His head touched the steering wheel as he doubled over, chuckling.  Nick just sat back in his seat and glared.

“You never did tell me what happened with that,”  Finnick said once he’d calmed down.

“I don’t have to tell you shit,” Nick quoted back at him.

“Hey, I told you my deep, personal, childhood dream.  You owe me an embarrassing story.”

“What makes you think it’s embarrassing?”

“If it weren’t you would’ve been bragging about it until I threatened to kill you for mentioning it.”

Nick rolled his eyes.

“Just give me the thirty second version.”

Nick took a second, trying to come up with the best way to put it.  He doubted Finnick had seen or read about the press conference, but everybody was aware of the protests and the maulings and the interspecies tension.  He didn't want to sound like he was pinning all of that craziness on one person, though.  He could talk about the twist and turns of case itself, which they technically did crack open. He could talk about her.

“We worked well together,” he said finally.  “And then we didn’t.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“You know how if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is?  It’s like that.”

* * *

 

Nick decided to take a walk.  He’d already overstayed his welcome at Finnick’s.  Too much of the temperamental fox wasn’t good for the soul.  And he could tell he was trying to hold in nosy questions about Judy, only he still didn’t remember her name so it came out in phrases like “bunny fuzz”, which was just confusing, or “rabbit gumshoe”, which was weird, or “hopper copper”, which only sounded clever due to the rhyme.

He figured out how to erase the incriminating voiceover by rerecording on top of it.  Of course he had nothing to say, so he just stood in silence with his thumb on the record button until he was sure the previous statement was gone forever.  What he caught on playback wasn’t complete silence after all, but the distant background noise of passing cars and static and the dull clang of someone shutting a nearby door.  Muffled, quiet, non-silence.  Satisfied, he shoved the pen back in his pocket and kept going.

Nick found himself taking a shortcut through the old city square and ended up stopping at Griffin Park.  The area really did look worse for wear.  It was about midday and all the graffiti and dying shrubs and cracks in the concrete stood out in the harsh light.  Twenty-five years ago it was a much nicer place, certainly a much busier one.  The wall surrounding it was half overgrown with weeds and vines and multi-colored spray paint signatures and crude drawings.  The wrought-iron sign framing the entrance was rusted over, reddish stains trailed down the wall.

The park was almost abandoned, but not quite.  A bunch of kids were playing soccer in an open field and a couple was eating lunch on the overgrown lawn. The trees stood together in clusters.  Very thick in some spots and patchy in others.  Some of them bowed, bent over into the dirt, others had grown in odd angles with their branches twisting this way and that in bizarre formations.   

He followed a little stream running along the north side, deeper and deeper into the park.  The stream tapered off into a pathetic little string of water until it was barely more than a riverbed of moss and dirty green sludge and litter.  A stone bridge carried him over the stream to an area covered in bushy, untamed grass.  He was well acquainted with this bridge.  He used to talk tourists into buying shares of it as a national landmark.  Which it wasn’t, but some tourist believed anything pressed into a plaque.  The old buildings still stood in the background.  A decrepit greenhouse with broken windows and part of an old railroad depot that had been retrofitted into a museum that eventually went under due to lack of funds.  It was all there, shabby, run down, and very, very quiet.

Someone had left a beach chair down in the dry river bed amidst all the litter.  He didn’t think much of it when sat down.  It wasn’t so bad; getting down to the bottom of his lowest common denominator beverage in the middle of all the wild vegetation the city proper had largely neglected. It wasn’t so good either. The silence was starting to grow stale.

And then he sees her.

It’s just her ears at first, and then slowly her head and shoulders appear over the vegetation covering the other side of the riverbank.  His shades threw off the colors and she’s dimmer than he remembers and so he tries to convince himself he’s not seeing what he thinks he’s seeing.  She’s out of uniform, for one thing, and in his mind she didn’t even own civilian clothes, so perhaps it’s only his imagination.  

She’s walking down the beaten path up to the bridge, her eyes constantly scanning the area around her as if lost.  She can’t see him over all the shrubbery covering the river bank, but he can see her, at least until she wanders up the bridge too far over his head.  He stays frozen in his seat and wonders if this is the coincidental meeting he’d been silently mulling over all this time. How long had it been anyway? Months?  She’s probably forgotten him by now.  And he’s a bit at a loss because he’d been dreading accidentally running into her and then he’d been missing it and now here she is and he feels so unprepared.

And then she calls his name. Not like a greeting or an exclamation like she’s seen him, but more like a question.  Like she’s hoping for an answer back.  And he realizes it's not a coincidence at all.  She came here specifically to find him.  And in a few seconds she’ll be over that bridge and she inevitably will.  And all he can do is sit there and slurp the last of his drink as loud as he can because as much as he’s unsure what to do he needs to know why she’s found him.

It’s something about the case, because of course it is. And he finds himself leaving, slower this time, because he’s not going to let on how confusing it is to see her just to talk about that.  And the persistent bunny follows him because of course she would.  

Then he has to stop because all of a sudden she, Judy Hopps, sounds like she’s apologizing.  And for a moment time slows down to a crawl.  She's apologizing and she means it.  

She was nothing like everybody else.  Mammals in this city didn’t so much as pick up their litter.  No one actually apologized. Nobody went out of their way to fix what they broke, no one could live with that kind of conviction.  And maybe that was just Judy.  Maybe that was how she'd made such a deep impression onto his life in such a short time. Maybe that was why he had felt her absence every day since. For the first time it occurs to him that he might've made some kind of impression on her too.

And then suddenly she’s crying.  And he’s sort of glad he can’t see her, because he doesn’t know what to do with the that.  He doesn’t trust people with his own tears and he never wanted them from anybody else.  But she’s letting them happen anyway.  And he wants to turn and hug her and shake her and tell her no, he never hated her, could never hate her, ever. In fact he thinks he’s wanted to forgive her for a long time now.  But he’s patient.  He waits for her to get everything out.  And his paw closes around the pen. Because after all, she did have him on the hook for awhile.  And because he wants to remember this.

She tapers off in a quiet little sob.  And he holds still, waiting.  When he’s sure she has nothing more to say he stops the recording, rewinds it, plays it back.

_ I really am just a dumb bunny. _

He’ll let her erase it.  It's only fair.

_ I really am just a dumb bunny. _

Her eyes are shining and huge and still tearing but she laughs a little.  She looks relieved.  Just as relieved as he is.  More, probably. She’d be a terrible con-artist, he thinks.  Yeah, she’s clever, but she’s also to forthright for her own good.  Her heart is written all over her face, plain as day.

He opens his arms and lets her in.  She ambles over, head hanging. She crosses out of the line of shadow cast under the bridge and stops directly in front of him. Her head drops into his chest. 

His heart pinches.  He pulls her in.

There's a lot that he needs to tell her; that he missed her, that he’s sorry he walked away, that he hurt her too, but he doesn't.  Not directly.  He just holds her and hopes she understands.  

She’s halfway between sniffling and giggling.  He accuses her of trying to steal the pen, which makes her laugh and reach for it weakly.  He loves how comfortable this is, the light teasing. That they were close enough to step on each other's toes, or tail, but that was kind of okay.

She finally leads him over the bridge, out of the park.  “How did you find me?” he asks.

“Your… business partner, let’s say, he gave me a list.”

“A list?”

“Of places he thought you might be.  Sorry about your apartment, by the way,” she winces sympathetically.

“It’s only water,” he shrugs, twirling the pen loosely in his fingers.  “So, you know all my usual haunts now, huh?”

“Can’t hide from me now, slick,” she laughs.

“I just need better haunts is all,” he fumbles a turn and the carrot drops out of his paws.  She doesn’t make a move while he picks it up.

“You kept that stupid pen. This whole time.” She says wistfully, almost to herself.

“Stupid pen comes in handy,” he explains.

“Maybe you just missed me.”  

“Did I?” he says coyly.  He makes her wait a little too long and she lightly pushes his arm.  “Yes.  Yes, I think I did.” 

**Author's Note:**

> The movie quotes Nick flips through in the beginning are from the following:  
> -What's up, Doc?  
> -It Happened One Night  
> -Fairly OddParents (ep: Action Packed)  
> -Whitesnake's Here I Go Again  
> -The Big Lebowski  
> -Toy Story
> 
> The made up long disease acronym to cover suspicious behavior was also a joke from What's Up Doc?... I had that movie playing on loop at my house for like three years.
> 
> Reitherman Ave. is named for Woolie Reitherman, one of Disney's legendary "Nine Old Men" animators.
> 
> Shout out to Reddit for catching the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl parallel in the painting on the side of Finnick's van.


End file.
